Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Most people have had an experience of time slowing down, maybe like in a traffic accident or while they’re falling from a height, or tumbling over beneath the waves and drowning or something. Or, if you’re in pain, a minute seems like an hour. What’s the saying? The watched pot never seems to boil. You know, while you’re waiting for the pot to boil, if you go away it boils right away. You like have to hurry back it seems. But if you sit there, watching it, it seems never to boil.

Time is so elastic, and it’s not just that it’s speeded up in this era; it could also be slowed down if we’re more aware. Maybe you’ve experienced that on some drug or something. Maybe you’ve experienced it in a dream or a vision. Time can also be very slow motion. The outer slowing down of time with slow motion film and all is just an image of how this feels internally, when you’re more aware. By sharpening you’re awareness, processing the frames of awareness like a movie frame. Every step seems to be slower, you can be very aware of lifting and moving your foot forward and shifting the weight in your abdomen and putting down the other foot and stepping on it—without walking slower, by shifting the mind, by more sharp and quick awareness. Not thinking faster, but with quicker awareness.

This is attention training. This is awareness training. This is part of samadhi or focused awareness. We can train ourselves in this way to be aware of more mind moments within one second or one minute. To be aware of the space between thoughts, not just the thoughts that we’re caught in, and so on. And to slow down a little and to be more present so we can choose how and if to respond to stimuli, not just blindly reacting. The secret of mindful anger management is creating some space between the outer stimulus and your reaction, so you can choose how and when to respond.

I think that time is very elastic, and…what did Einstein say? Time slows down so much when you’re waiting to see if you can take that first kiss from a girl. That’s Albert Einstein by the way, I’m not making it up. So he doesn’t just talk about e=mc2 and how at the speed of light all mass is fused and so on, time and space continuum and different dimensions. He was actually saying that when you are keenly present and aware and involved wholly in something, when you’re on the edge of your mental seat, time seems to slow down, like waiting to see if you can kiss that girl, when you’re young.

When I came to my mother’s house the day after she had died it was already a museum of her unfinished gestures. The mysteries from the public library, due in two weeks. The half-eaten square of lasagna in the fridge.

The half-burned wreckage of her last cigarette, and one red swallow of wine in a lipsticked glass beside her chair.

Finally, a blue Bic on a couple of downs and acrosses left blank in the Sunday crossword, which actually had the audacity to look a little smug at having, for once, won.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Our children do, more than ever, grow up in a virtual reality: video games and TV and computers and texting. Leaving the body’s very reinforced by the culture.

In spiritual-religious communities there’s a mistrust of the body. Especially where there’s a real imprint of the kind of shadow-masculine of controlling the body and not getting seduced by pleasure. You see this in the monastic communities.

And of course we know, in this culture, there’s a mistrust of the body with pain, that pain is wrong, it’s bad, it’s to be controlled. And again, it’s totally wise and compassionate to use medication when appropriate, and we so overdo it. We’re so afraid of pain. We think that aging and death are kind of an embarrassment, an insult in some way. We anesthetize births and way over-interfere with dying.

So it’s a split. We get split from our bodies in this culture and it gets very much amplified with emotional wounding. If you really consider that the pain of our emotion lives in our bodies, when that emotional feels like too much, especially when we’re traumatized early, we have to leave. We have no other way to handle it. Emotional trauma makes us leave our bodies. The more emotional wounding there’s been, the more we’ve left our bodies. It’s pretty directly correlated.

So we push away the immediate experience of the pain in our body because we’re designed to try to anesthetize that much pain. The point, again, is not that we should avoid what comforts. It’s not even that we should stick with something that’s overwhelming.

The truth is our lives get very organized around avoiding unease and unpleasantness. It becomes important to recognize our flinch responses, our intolerance to physical discomfort or to difficult emotional weather. Because the habit is so quickly—without even be conscious of it—to leave our body and go into what I sometimes think of as the mental control tower, where we try to work things and maneuver things to feel better. We don’t stay. One of the best phrases I know, in terms of describing meditation, is learning to stay. Not in a way that’s uncompassionate. Not when it’s too much. But gradually getting the knack of noticing we’ve left, noticing we’re off in thoughts, and reconnecting with this aliveness.

Monday, November 22, 2010

I’m not big on utopias, and I think one thing that any candid appraisal of technology would have to acknowledge is that every new technology is creating nearly as many problems as it is solving. And most of the problems in our lives today are technogenic, they’ve been generated by previous technologies. It suggests very clearly that most of the problems in the future will be technogenic, created by technologies that we’ve made today. For that reason alone, it’s not utopia, and where we’re headed is not a place where there are no problems or technology solves, mends everything so that we kind of live in this state of bliss. Or, it’s not even to suggest that there’s some endpoint in evolution, or some Omega Point where we’re all headed and everything is fixed and works perfectly, or it’s, in some ways, culminated in perfection. First of all, there is no endpoint in evolution–in fact the point of it is that there is no endpoint, that it’s an open-ended process of continual flux and change and more importantly that the nature of the change itself is changing. So in that way there’s no utopia, but also part of that internal flux is the fact that problems are constantly being invented as well as solutions.

However, saying that I do think there’s a moral dimension to technology and that comes in the fact that while it’s true that newly affected technology will create as many, rarely as many problems as solutions, it’s not neutral. I wouldn’t say that life is neutral although obviously life cannot go on without death. Death is sort of part of those two cycles. But even though for every animal that’s born there’s an animal that dies, we don’t think of life as neutral. No, we say life is good. Overall, the net effect of life is good.

More life is better, even though everything born dies, and so you say “Why isn’t that neutral?” That’s because the same thing happens in technology, when something is invented–let’s say you have a hammer. You could use that hammer to kill someone or you could use it to build something, and there is a sense that that’s just neutral. They’re just tools. You can use them for harm or good.

But in fact, the invention of that hammer actually introduces a brand new choice that we’ve never had before, and that choice, I think, tips the balance. That new choice that did not exist before, tips the balance slightly in favor of the good because there is a new choice for good or harm that had never existed before. That new choice itself is good. Even if we choose the harm in it, we have a choice we did not have before.

So, I think, it turns out that you don’t need very much more good over time to get progress. That if you use technology to create 1% more than you destroy a year, that 1% compounded over time is what we call progress.

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours. One fall day I heard above me, and above the sting of the wind, a sound I did not know, and my look shot upward; it was a flock of snow geese, winging it faster than the ones we usually see, and, being the color of snow, catching the sun so they were, in part at least, golden. I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us as with a match, which is lit, and bright, but does not hurt in the common way, but delightfully, as if delight were the most serious thing you ever felt. The geese flew on, I have never seen them again. Maybe I will, someday, somewhere. Maybe I won't. It doesn't matter. What matters is that, when I saw them, I saw them as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

I am dead because I lack desire, I lack desire because I think I possess. I think I possess because I do not try to give. In trying to give, you see that you have nothing; Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself; Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing: Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become; In desiring to become, you begin to live.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

…or just look at this pole and try to relax the impulse to define it or interpret it or decide whether or not it is beautiful. Try to notice what it feels like to see, as if you had no words for any of the forms or colors in front of you, as if the words on the paper were written in a language you never learned to read.

…or let your gaze spread gently across your entire field of vision, taking in the area immediately in front of you, the farthest distance you can observe without straining, the right and left edges of your peripheral vision, and everything in between. Take it all in at once—the whole three-dimensional volume of visual space. This is what the present looks like. This is what it feels like to see without spinning a story. This is what it feels like to see as a young child sees, simply fascinated with the seeing itself. Sixty seconds can feel like a long time. Try stringing together several intervals of four or five seconds instead.

…or listen to what this moment sounds like without needing to know the source of the sounds or to evaluate any of them as pleasant or unpleasant. Steep in the wonder of vibrations striking tiny bones inside your ears and massaging that space where all of the internal chatter plays out, wave after wave of internal sound. There’s no need to tamp down the internal sounds that well up as you’re listening. Allow them to play out as they will, trying to be aware of the silence between the waves. Use the activity of internal sound to remind you to spread your listening out in all directions and become absorbed by it.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

We’re often quite sure about what other people need to do, how they should live, and whom they should be with. We have 20/20 vision about others, but not about ourselves. When you do The Work, you see who you are by seeing who you think other people are. Eventually you come to see that everything outside you is a reflection of your own thinking. You are the storyteller, the projector of all stories, and the world is the projected image of your thoughts.

* * * * *

We only fear what we are—what we haven’t gone inside and taken a look at and met with understanding. If I think you might see me as boring, it would frighten me, because I haven’t investigated that thought. So it’s not people who frighten me, it’s me that frightens me. That’s my job, until I investigate and stop this fear for myself. The worst that can happen is that I think you think about me what I think about myself. So I am sitting in a pool of me.

* * * * *

I like to ask, “Are you breathing yourself?” No? Well, maybe you’re not thinking yourself or making decisions either. Maybe it doesn’t move until it moves, like a breath, like the wind. And you tell the story of how you are doing it, so you can keep yourself from the awareness that you are nature, flowing perfectly. Who would you be without the story that you need to make a decision?

* * * * *

No one has ever been able to control their thinking, although people may tell the story of how they have. I don’t let go of my thoughts—I meet them with understanding, then they let go of me.

* * * * *

The ego is terrified of the truth. And the truth is that the ego doesn’t exist.

“The next time you pass by a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut, teardrop-shaped stone, don’t be so sure it’s just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful. Your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it—even before they could put their love into words.”

"If you ask people to imagine winning the lottery, they typically talk about the things they would do — ‘I’d go to Italy, I’d buy a boat, I’d lay on the beach’ — and they rarely mention the things they would think. But our data suggest that the location of the body is much less important than the location of the mind, and that the former has surprisingly little influence on the latter. The heart goes where the head takes it, and neither cares much about the whereabouts of the feet.”

Monday, November 15, 2010

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn’t it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God’s will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.

Howard resented the ache in his heart. He resented that it was there every morning when he woke up, that it remained at least until he had dressed and had some hot coffee, if not until he had taken stock of the goods in his brush cart, and fed and hitched Prince Edward, if not until his rounds were done, if not until he fell asleep that night, and if his dreams were not tormented by it. He resented equally the ache and the resentment itself. He resented his resentment because it was a sign of his own limitations of spirit and humility, no matter that he understood that such was each man’s burden. He resented the ache because it was uninvited, seemed imposed, a sentence, and, despite the encouragement he gave himself each morning, it baffled him because it was there whether the day was good or bad, whether he witnessed major kindness or minor transgression, suffered sourceless grief or spontaneous joy.

“Neuroscientists are aware that there is a system in the brain that they call the limbic system; it’s sometimes called the emotional brain. What I’ve attempted to do is create certain focusing exercises that will allow a person to be able to detect when their limbic system activates. So, then, well how do you go about doing this? Well, I can give you a tangible example.

Let’s say you’re listening to music and, as you listen to music, you are monitoring how your body is reacting to the music. Your body may smile if you like the music, but then at some point if there’s something you don’t like about the music, you get some other kind of sensation reaction in your body.

Or, you can listen to people talking, listen to people you agree with—politicians, philosophers, religious leaders—listen to them and then notice the impact on your body. Then, listen to people you disagree with—religious leaders, political leaders, philosophers—who have the opposite of your beliefs, then watch what happens in the body. Pay attention to that.

By monitoring your body’s reactions to sounds, especially human speech sounds or music, and then by monitoring your body’s reaction to external visual impressions, with time you can develop a sensitivity to detect the locations and flavors of sensation that are emotional in nature. It’s a training and it takes a while, but if you’re willing to do it, your whole body becomes like this high resolution emotional radar screen. So, as soon as there’s an impact from the physical world, you’re aware if there’s any emotional juice, however subtle—subtle is significant. If there is, you’re able to detect it and open up to it. If there’s not, you’re also aware of that fact.

Free of memory and hope, unlimited, abstract, almost future, the dead body is not somebody: It is death. Like the God of the mystics, whom they insist has no attributes, the dead person is no one everywhere, is nothing but the loss and absence of the world. We rob it of everything, we do not leave it one color, one syllable: Here is the yard which its eyes no longer take up, there is the sidewalk where it waylaid its hope. It might even be thinking what we are thinking. We have divided among us, like thieves, the treasure of nights and days.

In order to talk to the dead you have to choose words that they recognize as easily as their hands recognized the fur of their dogs in the dark. Words clear and calm as water of the torrent tamed in the wineglass or chairs the mother puts in order after the guests have left. Words that night shelters as marshes do their ghostly fires

In order to talk to the dead you have to know how to wait: they are fearful like the first steps of a child. But if we are patient one day they will answer us with a poplar leaf trapped in a broken mirror, with a flame that suddenly revives in the fireplace, with a dark return of birds before the glance of a girl who waits motionless on the threshold.

"The primary focus of this path of choosing wisely...is learning to stay present. Pausing very briefly, frequently throughout the day, is an almost effortless way to do this. For just a few seconds we can be right here. Meditation is another way to train in learning to stay or...learning to come back, to return to the present over and over again."

Salubrion Enso Clock

"In Zen Buddhist painting, ensō symbolizes a moment when the mind is free to simply let the body-spirit create. The brushed ink of the circle is usually done on silk or rice paper in one movement and there is no possibility of modification: it shows the expressive movement of the spirit at that time."